In 2002, two neighbors armed with spades
and seeds changed everything for crime-addled Quesada Avenue in San Francisco’s
Bayview-Hunters Point area. The street had been ground zero for the area’s drug
trade and its attendant violence. But when Annette Smith and Karl Paige began
planting flowers on a small section of the trash-filled median strip, Quesada
Gardens Initiative was
born. Over the course of the next decade, the community-enrichment project
profoundly altered the face of this once-blighted neighborhood.

Jeffrey Betcher is the Initiative’s
unlikely spokesperson. A gay white man driven to the majority-black area by the
high cost of housing elsewhere, he moved into a house on Quesada Avenue in 1998
to find drug dealers selling from his front stoop and addicts sleeping beneath
his stairs. He told me about the day that he returned home from work to
discover that his neighbor Annette had planted a little corner of his yard.

“Even though there was a throng of
people—drug dealers who were carrying guns, pretty scary folks—she had planted
flowers on this little strip of dirt by my driveway,” he told me. “I was so
moved by that . . . I thought, that’s what life is about. That’s what community
development is about. That’s what’s going to change this block faster than any
public investment or outside strategy. And in fact it did.”

We too often fail to consider food a
social good or to understand that growing, selling, and eating food is by its
nature a meaningful social act.

A group of neighbors got together for a
barbeque, and Jeffrey—who has a background in community organizing—started a
conversation about the positive aspects of living in the neighborhood. What
followed was a long-term, consensus-based process that resulted in the creation
of a series of gardens on vacant land in the surrounding blocks. On Quesada Avenue,
the median strip was transformed into a wonderland of Canary Island date palms,
bright flowers, and leafy vegetation. Any neighbor who wants to can organize a
new gardening effort, take responsibility for the existing gardens, or put
together a public art project.

While Quesada Gardens Initiative is not specifically
focused around growing food, it does incorporate a food garden used to teach
local children about crops, as well as free-form community garden plots. And
the way the project uses gardening as a powerful locus of community engagement
and empowerment demonstrates an important truth about the social value of food
that we seem to have largely forgotten in this country.

Annette Smith, one of the founders of the Quesada Garden Initiative, at the unveiling of a new mural.

A major reason our food system is so
damaged—so dominated by corporate interests, rife with unhealthy products, and
unbalanced by unequal access—is that we too often fail to consider food a
social good or to understand that growing, selling, and eating food is by its
nature a meaningful social act. What we eat is far more than a pile of
commodities. Not only is food’s essential job to nourish our bodies, but it can
also serve as a creator of quality livelihoods, a locus of community engagement
and cohesion, and an engine of citizen empowerment and education.

To improve our system, we must realize
and act on this fundamental truth. Most of the industrial food corporations do
not. Their central motivation is profit, and the highest profit apparently
comes from treating food as a product like any other—a plate full of widgets
that can be engineered, created, priced, marketed, and exploited.

Luckily, a growing number of people
concerned with the origins and impacts of their food are rejecting this
materialistic and one-dimensional view of what we eat. Projects and
organizations all over the country are putting food back into the social
context it has traditionally inhabited.

“The change that we’ve created is not
about the garden, it’s about the gardeners.”

For example, companies and cooperatives
that supply local food to an area’s population strongly demonstrate that food
is central to community cohesion and to local economies. In school garden
programs, students learn the complex processes and intense collaboration that
go into making what they eat. Projects that help underserved populations like
refugees and inner-city residents grow produce help make food once again a
central concern of family and community life.

Quesada Gardens Initiative reflects the
power of growing things to bring a local community together in a powerful way.
Jeffrey made this point as he took me on a tour of the garden plots dotted
amongst the houses and stores of the surrounding neighborhood.

Quesada Avenue, the block once known as
the most dangerous in the area, has been transformed completely and now serves
as a hub of community life. At the top of its hill, Jeffrey showed me the
beautifully designed food garden for educating kids. Behind the chain-link
fence, stalks of corn stood at attention beside a glowing patch of leafy
greens.

A teaching garden where children can learn about growing food.

Photo by Katherine Gustafson

At another garden a few blocks away—a
patchwork of small plots that had previously been an improvised trash dump—a
sandbox and rope swing indicated that the garden was for more than growing
food. Kids, in fact, had painted the signs that ringed the garden’s perimeter
with such slogans and quotes as “Don’t dump on my garden” and “If you want to
change the world, start in your own neighborhood – Harvey Milk.”

Quesada Initiative’s success arises from
the project’s appreciation of gardening as the means to an end more profound
than a harvest of lettuce and peas. While the plants produced are of course a
key motivation for any gardening enterprise, growing food can also—should also—serve other important social
purposes, like cultivating a culture of civic engagement and an ethos of
community participation.

“The change that we’ve created is not
about the garden, it’s about the gardeners,” Jeffrey told me. He stopped to
greet a neighbor as we rounded the corner back onto Quesada Avenue. As we
continued on our way, he smiled at me with satisfaction.

“We realize we have done something right
here,” he said.

Interested?

Which symbolizes success, and which disintegration? It may not be what you think.

How to turn a lawn into lunch, swap preserves, glean, boost your food security, live the good life.

Katherine Gustafson wrote this article
for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful
ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Katherine is a
freelance writer and editor based in the Washington, DC, area. Her first book, Change
Comes to Dinner, about sustainable food, was published
this month by St. Martin's Press.